an is concerned, apart from
the mind which formulates it, but who saw life in its totality and
made thought luminous and real by disclosing it at all points against
the background of the life, the nature, and the habits of the thinker.
This is the method of culture as distinguished from that of scholarship;
and this is also the disclosure of the personality of Plato as
distinguished from his philosophical genius. Whoever studies the
"Dialogues" with his heart as well as with his mind comes into
personal relations with the richest mind of antiquity.

Chapter X.

Liberation through Ideas.

Matthew Arnold was in the habit of dwelling on the importance of a
free movement of fresh ideas through society; the men who are in touch
with such movements are certain to be productive, while those whose
minds are not fed by this stimulus are likely to remain unfruitful.
One of the most suggestive and beautiful facts in the spiritual
history of men is the exhilaration which a great new thought brings
with it; the thrilling moments in history are the moments of contact
between such ideas and the minds which are open to their approach. It
is true that fresh ideas often gain acceptance slowly and against
great odds in the way of organised error and of individual inertness
and dulness; nevertheless, it is also true that certain great ideas
rapidly clarify themselves in the thought of almost every century.
They are opposed and rejected by a multitude, but they are in the air,
as we say; they seem to diffuse themselves through all fields of
thought, and they are often worked out harmoniously in different
departments by men who have no concert of action, but whose minds are
open and sensitive to these invisible currents of light and power.

The first and the most enduring result of this movement of ideas is
the enlargement of the thoughts of men about themselves and their
world. Every great new truth compels, sooner or later, a readjustment
of the whole body of organised truth as men hold it. The fresh thought
about the physical constitution of man bears its fruit ultimately in
some fresh notion of his spiritual constitution; the new fact in
geology does not spend its force until it has wrought a modification
of the view of the creative method and the age of man in the world;
the fresh conception of the method of evolution along material and
physical lines slowly reconstructs the philosophy of mental and
spiritual development. E